It’s called “A Joyful Adventure.” I wrote it after listening to this enlightened set of variations by Makoto Ozone:
This is Yoshi, a Japanese pianist, performing Ozone’s funky arrangement of Chopin’s Waltz no.7. What Ozone did to this waltz was brilliant, such a lovely mix of jazz with romantic.
Ozone’s treatment of Chopin put me in a jazzy mood, and helped free my mind from the rut of writer’s block that creeps up on me from time to time. After listening to this a number of times, I felt very creative. I wanted to play around with these jazzy colors, so I wrote the music above as an homage to Ozone. And by homage, I mean I totally stole his mojo.
Play the video starting at 3:17, and you will hear the rhythm I lifted from Ozone. I wanted to take that exact soundscape and make it my own, to write something as tasty as possible.
Of course, once I started down that road my project quickly morphed into something new, something that doesn’t feel like stealing at all. The music packs its own flavor of punch. It’s got something new to say.
By the way, I was also listening to some Gershwin while writing this music, and wouldn’t you know it, some of his mojo got sponged up into my music as well.
Who will I steal from tomorrow?… Only time will tell.
By the way, this music is based very loosely on Mazurek Dobrowskiego, the Polish national anthem. It is also the final section of my 2nd piano sonata, which you can listen to in its entirety here.
When life becomes intense, I tend to stop writing music for a time. This is usually due to a simple lack of time. When a child is newly born, or a business newly started, there is little free time to compose music. However these intense times also plant the seeds for the ripest artistic fruit. Momentous occasions, personal tragedies or triumphs, and major life changes generate emotions that (for me) can only fully be expressed through art. So usually during these crazy times, I am full of artistic energy but have no time to actually put it somewhere.
This music was written when life was crazy. Not sure how I found the time to compose this, but thank god I did. I remember composing a note here and there between teaching classes. In my life, everything was falling apart. I won’t go into the details other than to say that shit had hit the fan. The music I think is still optimistic in its own way. I am an optimist at heart myself. What am I supposed to do, write the saddest music you ever heard? I’m not some tortured Romantic weeping into the piano. I prefer music with a bit of a lift, what can I say?
Love themes pop up all over the place in this music. They poke their heads around corners and say hello, sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes with more serious undertones. Then after they say what they came to say, they flit away again. This whole sonata has that quality as well, and it’s something I really love about this music. I love love themes, especially when they aren’t overly gooey, but more sincere, more complex.
This music is in sonata form. It’s got a lot of Beethoven-inspired content in there, with some country-western overtones. I really like the return of the main theme (starting at 7:57) all the way to the end. This is some of my strongest writing in the more strictly classical vein. There is a touch of modern dissonance in there, but this is truly a classical work.
…at times a bit too classical-sounding? Hard to say. I expressed much that I wished to express with this music, but also something was holding me back I think. I clung tightly to the old forms and styles. My own voice emerges plenty of times throughout the piece, but I don’t feel like I am always my authentic self in every corner of the music. Even if the music sounds like it’s made of 100 different ideas, good old sonata form is right there through the whole piece. Beethoven hovers over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow at every jazzy dissonance.
Ok so the ghost of Beethoven has haunted me for years, and I still haven’t found a way to put him down, to unspool him from my music. But I would ask: how can a house be expected to unbolt itself from its very foundation and just walk away?
So Beethoven remains, and the music is more structured for it. I could go back and try to shoe horn more stylistic originality into the music, but I am going to cut my losses and write the next thing instead. This is still me trying to figure out how to write a sonata, and what I want MY sonatas to actually sound like. Everyone has to have student work. Or perhaps all work is student work, if we never stop learning.
A while back, before Charlie was born, back when I first started this website, I was working on some variations on Poland’s national anthem. This started as a challenge from Polish pianist Joanna Różewska to do something with Polish folk music.
I worked diligently on it for a while, but got too in my own head about it. I couldn’t figure out what direction to take the music. Should it be variations? Also do I have any kind of connection to this music, to Poland? What am I trying to say with this?
I wrote the main body of the first variation, and never got further than that. After chasing my own tail for a while, I put this project down and walked away, thinking wrongly that what I had written so far wasn’t all that good. What also happened around that time was I quit teaching, went to Rome with Erica and Jack for a month, then came back and started a totally new career. I wasn’t writing much music during that crazy time…. When I finally came back to composing a few months later, I was rediscovering the magic of writing Quiquern, which became my musical obsession going forward. The Poland music was suspended indefinitely.
Over the next year or so I began to spin out the plan for my second sonata. I wanted the sonata to end with a redemptive quality, with a strong overtone of love and hope. As I’ve said before, so much of my music reaches for this same sentiment. Maybe I’ve just got love and hope on the brain.
What better way to express that sentiment than with the idea that something that once seemed lost may yet still be recoverable. The title “Not Yet Lost” stood out in my mind as the right way to express these feelings. Suddenly the Polish music had a meaning I could relate to, something I would enjoy exploring and playing around with. Though I am no Polish patriot, and the the nationalistic thrust behind the Polish anthem has no historical significance to me personally, the sentiment behind the music suddenly struck a chord inside me. It clicked! I dove back into the music and started sketching out ideas.
This is hard to describe in words: I wanted to take the hope contained in Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, and create variations on that. In other words, the variations are not so much variations on the musical theme (melody) itself, but instead on the theme of the music: the idea that something that seems lost is actually not yet lost, a hope for the future, a hope that we can build something worth building. That’s what Mazurek Dąbrowskiego expresses, and that’s why I chose it, not because of the melody. I took the melody in the theme and dismantled it, and sprinkled the component parts throughout my variations, but the variations don’t sound like the theme. But they do express love, hope, excitement, eagerness, etc. That’s the reason why, in the end, I call them “reinventions” instead of variations.
Here is the main theme:
From the get-go this music establishes a gentle, gliding, loving vibe. Though the original lyrics to Mazurek Dąbrowskiego are all about marching off to victory, I’ve dropped all of that militarism and allowed the simple clarity of the melody to linger in the air for a minute. I’ve also dropped the original 3/4 time. This meter switch has deprived it of any recognizable Mazurka sound, and instead given the tune a more spacious 4/4 runway.
The first reinvention goes like this:
This reinvention was largely already completed from my work on this piece over a year ago. I went back in and tightened up the form, took all the puzzle pieces I had struggled to connect and re-sculpted them so they fit together just fine. Turns out the puzzle pieces were all made of clay anyhow.
I originally thought that first reinvention sounded like Nordstrom’s piano noodling, but now I don’t think so anymore. Now I just hear a love theme. If the original theme is a reserved and sweet little love, this first variation is more of a gushy, open-armed love. This music is plush and at times unabashed in its amorous sentimentality. That suits me well for my current frame of mind.
The second reinvention goes like this:
This one was largely influenced by Bach, specifically this Gavotte from English Suite #3:
I heard that little nugget on the radio a few weeks ago and couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to create something of my own with that same snappy Gavotte feeling. I also wanted to make sure that this music had something to say about love. This love music is at times brooding and stormy, other times playful and jolly, and sometimes it’s reaching for something inspirational. It fits in with the other music, even if it sounds unique. I’d also like to note that the jolly bits have a certain dance-like quality, which stems from the Gavotte that originally inspired it.
Took me about two weeks to write that 2nd reinvention, though I should note that the only time I really get to work on any of this stuff is like 10pm to 11pm. So two weeks is pretty decent turn-around time for me.
As you listen, you’ll hear fragments of the Polish melody shining through, though it gets warped by the motion of the music around it. I do not take a vert strict view of Theme and Variations. I don’t want to write a set of ten perfect little variations, the way Mozart did for example:
That’s too clean for my taste. And dare I say it, maybe even a bit boring by the time the 5th or 6th variation rolls in. My variations are much more difficult to put into clean little boxes. Instead they wander and play and do pretty much whatever I want them to do. They do not conform to the original structure of the initial theme. Of course this means I have to be careful to make sure the source material still comes through to the listener and not just the musicologist. This is a tricky tightrope to walk.
That initial Polish theme, in my opinion, is too simple for straight variations. It has wonderful expressive potential, especially for writing inspirational, loving, or even glorious music, music that reaches for a higher ideal. But if I stick to that initial structure for 10 variations, I’d get bored….
I don’t think I’ll write 10 reinventions or variations or whatever any ways. Maybe I’ll just do 3 or 4, not sure yet. It’s not about coming up with as many variations as I can. It’s about crafting a larger piece of music, with a grander story arc that takes the listener where I want them to go. In other words, this form is a vehicle to express my overall point: that hope and love are not lost, that something which at one point might have seemed unreachable can in fact be reached. I think for that reason, each variation will reach for something. This music will be riddled with hope and grand gestures, bold statements.
That’s not to say the theme isn’t in there. This entire variation is built out of the theme. Just look at the first melody line:
Those notes are the same notes as the main melody of the Polish tune, though now woven into a quicker kind of Baroque-y thing that is also minor. But even if it is hard to pick out that original melody by ear, the structure is right there on paper. I like variations like this. I want to write a Bach-inspired romp with a few metal-esque riffs in there, music that makes you want to hear it again, makes you think. It can sound new but still have deep roots to the past. It’s a fun challenge. Above all else, I want this music to say what I need it to say, even if that means I have to cast aside any sort of intense loyalty to the original melody. This is my art, so I control the form.
When all is said and done, I’m writing far too much music to squeeze into one sonata. I’ll probably have to “cull the herd” a bit, and only keep the music that truly speaks the way I need it to speak. A lot of this other material will end up in the rubbish heap (“bonus tracks”).
Today I finished writing the second movement of my second sonata.
I worked on this for some time, trying to express something I can’t quite put into words. About times that were hard, when I found my self searching fruitlessly for a summer bird during the dead of winter.
All the main melodies throughout this piece started as song.
You know how it goes when you have a lot to say… too much to say. You try to squeeze too much meat into the sausage and it starts to look a bit unseemly. The feelings and hopes I wanted to express in the music could never fit into one song.
So I exploded the music and let it wander and quest for 20 minutes. It still feels like a song to me.. but now it spins and wrangles and waits and wants, and pulls you along and along like a river.
This is music about healing. Healing is not pleasant when it’s actually happening. Sure it feels great once it’s done, but the process itself is slow. It requires intense patience, and often comes with pain. So this music isn’t about being healed, but about healing.
This music is about waiting, about not giving up, about continuing to strive for optimism even when prospects remain dreary. The length of the music allows it to take on a new character: it stretches out before you, unabashedly long, extending into the distance, as if we are standing on a hill top on a cold, crisp day, looking out over endless miles of fields, trying to make out a little puff of smoke in the distance. Is it a cloud, or perhaps chimney smoke?
We start to get a sense of the power of time. Each little musical episode represents a day, a unique moment in one’s life. Day after day after day passes. There are beautiful moments and challenging ones, but they all pass eventually, and soon become part of a larger tapestry, where common themes emerge.
Life is like this as well. As we deal with each day’s unique challenges and surprises, it can be difficult to see the common threads that tie our lives together. However as the years stack up, those common themes become steel cables that tether us to our loved ones, and to our shared histories. The daily episodes fade in terms of importance in comparison to the mountainous weight of the passing years. In the end these main themes, these shared memories, these bonds become everything that matters to us. They become the vision we have created of ourselves and what we believe in: who we are, what we have stood for, what it means to be a family, what it means to love, what we feel we have accomplished, what we hope to pass on to our children, what we wish to be remembered for.
So in a way this is a song about life and about building a life with someone. It isn’t a clean story arc (neither is life). At times the music swells, other times it falls. But most times, like life, it just goes by, stacking up over time, adding on more and more experiences, until by the end you’ve lost track of some of it. The whole thing blurs together, with certain important moments standing out.
And there through it all are the main themes, the bonds that tie us all together, growing stronger with each passing moment.
What can I say about love? It never turns out quite the way we expect. Then again neither does life. The years stack up, and the weight of all that time compacts our experiences, until we are forged into something new, like metamorphic rock. A good marriage has the same effect. As the years pile up, any cracks that once existed between us are compressed, our minds and outlooks are reformed, until after a while we have been reshaped, remade together.
This music chases love, chases life. It races ahead, keeps the fire lit. It’s hunting, sniffing something out, hungrily searching through the night. The years fly by, but the fire stays lit. It’s a dance, a celebration, though a frenetic one.
While you listen, stomp your foot! How about one loud clap! Why the hell not!
I have a limited vocabulary for describing how it feels to experience love, real love, so I have to compose instead, to try and capture the uncapturable. This music gives just a taste of that. Love has many flavors, and this is one flavor I’ve tasted, and I want to share the feeling with the world. It may not always be pretty, but it tries hard to live passionately, to expresses itself freely, to communicate something meaningful. It doesn’t give up, even when challenges arise. It reaches out to feel a connection. It aches for it.
I have experienced this love. In fact, I experienced it today, while watching my wife walk across the room. Sometimes my heart starts pounding for no reason, and this music appears inside my brain. Makes me want to spin around and around, until everything is blurry. The life we have built, the family we created, the years and shared experiences and adventures are all stacking up before me, until all I can do is marvel at the structure.
Keep living! Keep love in your heart, and share it with someone whenever possible. Stomp and dance and spin. And also, lay silently on your bed in the afternoon with the person you love, and watch the sun’s rays poke through the blinds. Compare the sizes of your feet, tell a silly story, share what’s in your heart. Grow together, always growing.
This piece is actually the third movement from my string quartet “Jackdaw.” Therefore at its heart it is based on the life and writings of Franz Kafka, like all the other music in that quartet. However this music has special meaning for me as well (also like all the music in that quartet). It feels especially meaningful during this current time in my life, when my own interactions with my father have become so very strange.
Kafka’s Letter to his Dad
When Kafka was about 36, he wrote a nasty letter to his dad. Apparently his father Hermann was a pretty difficult guy, constantly ridiculing Kafka for being a weakling, while refusing to care one bit that his son was a genius. Kafka’s stories are real mind-benders. The realities they portray are just “off” enough that they feel like they could be real life. One can recognize the landscape, envision oneself living in that world, but something in the reality is very wrong. Sometimes it’s hard to put one’s finger on… but impossible to ignore. Like the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the stories have the power to make one doubt one’s own world, to make one doubt mankind as a whole. It’s delicious writing, and frankly still horrifying to this day. Despite young Franz’s clear talent, Poppa Kafka just didn’t respect his son, and he made that known at every opportunity.
By age 36, Franz was tired of Hermann’s crap. He busted out some paper and really let Dad have it, for 45 hand-written pages. In his own way, Kafka believed that this letter would help heal their relationship, but in reality the letter was full of complaints, accusations, and invective. He plumbed the depths of his own hurt, and wrung the emotions out onto the page. If the letter is to be believed, Hermann was a toxic and narcissistic hypocrite, an abusive tyrant who never gave his fragile son even a kindly word or friendly look in all his life. The writing is heart-breaking and so very relatable, ripe as it is with a certain timeless pain that has been felt by so many sons across so many generations.
In one episode, Kafka describes a traumatizing experience from his childhood: one evening at bedtime he was begging his father for some water (perhaps even being a bit bratty about it), when his father, always a large and intimidating man, burst into his bedroom without warning and, in a rage, grabbed the small boy and locked him outside on the balcony with nothing on but his thin cotton sleep shirt. Kafka writes:
I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and that meant I was a mere nothing for him.
Franz Kafka, from Letter to His Father
Not only is this a sad story of parental mismanagement and emotional scarring, but it is also such a great insight into why so much of Kafka’s writing features nameless, faceless authority figures who carry out irrational sentences with a total lack of empathy or emotional connection. Moments that feature characters like that are some of the more disturbing vignettes from his stories; they make it all too easy to picture oneself being dragged away by faceless agents of the state who have no sense of human morality or concern for life. Kafka was able to translate his tragic daddy issues into terrifying metaphors for what it’s like to live in modern society. Now THAT’S how to cope with a bad upbringing.
Kafka’s father HermannFranz Kafka as a young man
Let’s all write letters to our dads!
Funny story: I had to send a letter to my own father recently. Mine was not as nasty as Kafka’s, nor was my father anywhere near as abusive as Hermann. But father-son relationships can be all varieties of strange, and mine definitely falls on that spectrum. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice it to say that at pretty much the same age as Kafka when he wrote his letter, I felt compelled to write a letter to my dad that I wish I didn’t have to write. It delivered the message, though I’m not sure it did anything to heal our relationship.
When Kafka completed his letter, he hand delivered it to his mother, and asked her to bear the letter to his father. Her mother read it once and immediately decided to hide it forever. As much as Kafka might have hoped his manifesto would help heal old wounds, his mother felt differently, and refused to take any part in provoking the monumental explosion that would likely follow should Hermann ever read it. My own letter was delivered directly to my father, though I’m actually not sure he read it. One can never know these things when direct communication becomes impossible.
Long story short, this music ain’t just about Kafka. I hope someday someone writes about how I skillfully took my familial pain and transformed it into timeless art we can all relate to. Whether or not that ever happens, I will say this: writing the music always makes me feel better.
The date was September 24, 2006, my 22nd birthday. Erica and I decided to have a picnic in Meadow Park, share a bottle of wine, and take a nap. It was during this wine-induced nap that somebody walked into our house, in the middle of the day no less, while we slept peacefully in the bedroom, and stole my laptop.
This particular laptop happened to contain all the music I had ever written up to that time. Was it backed up somewhere? Of course not. After all, my laptop had never been stolen before, so why would I need to back up everything I’d ever created. Nope, it was all right there, and someone stole it right out of my house in broad daylight. I never saw it again.
The thief did not take our DVD player. He did not take our television. He did not take my car keys or the stereo either. He didn’t even take the laptop’s power cord. Just the laptop. And of course my very reason for living.
When I awoke from my cat nap, it took me a good half hour to realize the laptop was gone. I won’t try to put into words what went through my head except to say this: all of my art was destroyed that day. I had no website, no hard drive, no printed copies. I felt like a victim of fire. I was completely alone with my grief.
Ok I was able to salvage a couple things. While ravaging through my belongings looking for any sheet music I could find, I miraculously discovered some printed pages stuffed down into a drawer. The pages were the original versions of what would later become the 3rd and 4th movements of my first piano sonata. I was also able to copy down from memory the scraps that would later become the last movement of my first string quartet. Other than those tidbits, everything else was taken forever. My entire career as a composer up to that point was a blank page.
It took me a long while to get into the headspace of composing again. When I finally did, for some reason this jolly music is what came out. Maybe it was the sense of hope that even though I had lost all my previous work, I could still write something new, that my life as a composer was not actually over. As I continued to write this, my hope only continued to grow. By the time it was done, there was a part of me that was glad I had lost my old work, which is a weird thing. In a way, it was a freeing experience to lose my student work. It allowed me to try new things, and not feel weighed down by whatever direction I had chosen in the past. I think that’s what this music is trying to say.
This music is the first movement from “Burning”: a trio for piano, clarinet, and cello.
Excerpt from journal. Dated July 27, 2012 – Prague
On a recommendation from a bartender, we headed toward a pub away from the city center, on some twisted alley or another. Our bellies were full of dumplings and gravy, our hearts starving for adventure. We waltzed into a well-lit bar and took a drink of the scenery.
The air was viscous with cigarette smoke. I immediately felt as though I were deep deep underwater, in a pub at the bottom of the sea. The rowdy conversations of the crowd drifted slowly toward me; from a distance I could see the words coming my way, yet still I couldn’t quite make them out. Men and women emphatically slapped the tables in laughter, rattling the half empty glasses and late night coffees and honey cakes, sending them floating away around the room. Others sipped their absinthes knowingly, balancing their cigarettes so delicately atop their outstretched fingers.
Ah Prague, ah absinthe. In honor of Bohemia we ordered two drams of the green concoction. Actually it wasn’t green… but it did smell like licorice, and it burned, burned!
It suddenly became very warm in that bar.
I was taking in my hazy surroundings when I saw her, sitting silently beside a red couch. She wasn’t outlandish, wasn’t putting herself out there, just relaxing and blending into the scenery. I’m not sure anyone else in the room even noticed her.
She was a thing of beauty.
She had a strong yet elegant frame made of fine wood panels. Her golden pedals glimmered and winked at me, beckoning me. Her keys were made of real ivory, an authenticity that can not be faked. This was no tourist attraction. This was the real shit, the soft underbelly, the pearl, that hard-to-reach part of your back. I was suddenly helpless against a mighty river of desire. I let it take me, wash over me, sweep me away.
I could tell right away that she was played regularly; all the tell-tale signs were present. The keys were bare and open for all the world to see, draped flirtatiously like freshly painted fingernails. The bench was pulled out, a bare leg peeking from beneath a knee-length skirt. However refined she may have seemed to an untrained eye, I could see from across the room how much she loved to be touched, that her strings were tight, her music sweet and pure.
I realized I was in a conversation with a man at the bar. While pretending to chat, my gaze kept wandering to her quiet corner of the room. She stared back at me unabashed. I wanted to put my hands on her that very moment, to know her secrets.
Erica looked at my face and read me like a book. I was lost already and there was no point trying to pull me back. We locked eyes and she signaled that I was free to go. I immediately moved to the instrument.
When I touched, I fell into a trance. Twenty minutes of absinthe-fueled dream music left my body.
Dumplings and cigarettes and alleyways. Twisting streets and beggars with their faces in the dirt. Pianos and absinthe and my wife’s soft skin. Love and travel and hunger and… feeling so lost that you forget what country you’re in.
I learned this recipe in Rome. This dish tastes super gourmet, but it’s actually very easy to make if you give the sauce the time it needs to fully mature. Serve this dish to your friends, and forever after you will be able to make them call you “chef”.
Potato gnocchi all’amatriciana – like Grandma used to make
For this recipe, the quality of ingredients is very important. Try to get yourself to an authentic Italian grocery store if you can. Guanciale might be difficult to find, but can be substituted with pancetta if need be. If you can’t find that, thick bacon is ok as long as it isn’t smoked. If you have the time, you could also make your own guanciale, assuming you have a whole pig’s head lying around. The gnocchi should be freshly made if possible.
Ingredients
3 thick slices of guanciale (pork made from pig jowls), chopped into small cubes
EVOO
1 small onion, chopped
Chopped mushrooms
Hot red pepper flakes
One can of whole tomatoes with juices (again, choose a can with no added preservatives, as natural as possible)
1 pound of potato gnocchi
Fresh basil
1 half jar of filleted anchovies packed in oil
1/2 cup grated Romano cheese
Directions:
Cook the guanciale in a large saute pan over medium heat and sizzle until just starting to turn brown. It should cover the pan with pork fat. Turn off heat and with a slotted spoon remove the guanciale bits.
If there isn’t a ton of rendered fat in the pan, add some EVOO. Turn heat back on and add onions, and cook over low until soft, but not browned. Add mushrooms and red pepper flakes for some kick.
Add tomatoes with juices and the guanciale to the pan. Throw in some anchovies. If they are high quality jarred anchovies, this won’t turn the dish overly fishy. They will actually disintegrate over time and become part of the sauce, and let me tell you, this will change your whole view of anchovies. Let the sauce bubble for at least half an hour. It will thicken quite a bit, but if it gets too thick add a bit of water. No need for any extra seasoning, this sauce will pack a lot of flavor from all that pork fat and those anchovies.
Boil some water and cook the gnocchi. When they float, they are done. Don’t overcook them or they will be too mushy. Pull out the gnocchi and add a dash of oil so they don’t stick together. Add a cup of the gnocchi water to the sauce and stir with some ripped up basil. This will meld all the flavors together.
Remove the sauce from heat and add the cheese on top. Serve it up with a bottle of Chianti Sangiovese. Congratulations, you will never eat jarred spaghetti sauce again.
Early this morning the stork paid us a visit, and he gave us the most precious gift. My second son, Charlie was born today.
He’s a strapping boy with dark brown hair and powerful lungs. Today he had to learn some important lessons: how to breathe air, how to eat, how to cry; crucial skills to survive in this world. But since it was his birthday, he got to spend most of the day lounging around on his mama, listening to her heartbeat (which he was so used to hearing from the inside) and smelling her familiar smells.
Charlie also met his older brother Jack.
Jack is a really great big brother. He put stickers on Baby Charlie, and rubbed his head too. Charlie popped his wrinkly little arm out of the blanket, and Jack rubbed the tiny fingers. They were like two old pals.
Two boys, two sons, my progeny, my little family, complete.
